I spent my formative years travelling around London. You’d think I’d be used to agressive men metaphorically (or indeed literally) dick-flailing in public. But.

I haven’t had to deal with this sort of nonsense on a regular basis since I left our wonderful capital over a year ago.

It’s fucking scary.

The train last night was basically Dick-Flailing Central. There was one drugged-up bloke screaming “we hate Rotherham” and yelling about football results and the miners’ strike (which, since it happened in ’84, he probably wasn’t even born for) and another six guys (boys, really) being drunk and loud. And there was yelling, and homophobia, and racism, and sexism, and all of the usual things that makes me stabitty. And the guy sitting next to me was laughing. Not shit-I’m-a-bit-scared laughing, but outright isn’t-this-hillarious laughing. I nearly punched him. Except, you know, that I might have ended up a little bit dead.

Anyway. Eventually the boys goaded each other into a fight. Involving a glass bottle. Which luckily didn’t get used, or broken. And I wasn’t too sad to see them getting kicked. It was a bit like a fight between UKIP and the BNP – you wanted them both to lose.

But glass bottles and drunken angry boy-men are a danger to everyone, sadly, not just themselves. And it wouldn’t have taken much to set Bottle-Guy off again. Like, say, someone looking at him in a funny way.

So with the carriage totally silent, and – no shit – every single person in the carriage looking at me, I walked out. Out of the carriage, past Bottle-Guy, Miner-Guy and all of their little friends, past every other fucker who’d done nothing, and down to the other end of the train. Where I found the conductors, tried to tell them what was happening and – burst into tears. Shaking, crying, the works.

How humilliating. And how fucking terrifying.

The good news is that this persuaded them to get the police out.

The other good news is that at least one of them will be charged for fare evasion.

The bad news is that nothing’s likely to happen about the guy who was waving the bottle around.

But. They were trying to get to Sheffield. They got arrested a stop down the line. The last thing the conductor said to me was that he sincerely hoped the police would keep them nicked until the last train had gone. And at least one of them will be fined for it. So. The moral of the story is: don’t be a pillock on the train. Otherwise, I’ll do my best to get you arrested.

“Just because somebody belongs to a minority group, that doesn’t mean they’re capable of rational thought”

I’ll have to make this into a sampler, I think, and hang it on my wall, so that the next time I’m shocked to hear (for instance) that a group of lesbians have told a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man that “as soon as [she] finds a nice girlfriend, [she]’ll become a real lesbian” I can look at it and keep calm. Instead of (for instance) telling the lesbians that, if that’s true, all they need is a good boyfriend each to make them into real straight women.

I’m tinkering. I’ve obviously got the tinkerbug since I started messing around with Teaspoon of Sugar last week!

Anyway, I realised that for someone who’s got used to captioning every photo they post, I’ve been pretty fucking shit about making the bingo cards readable. So I’m updating and revamping the collection. Be prepared for blips over the next few days, but I’ll try to keep the content up.